In all my years of architecture school and practice, there seems to be a pervasive myth that my job is pretty and easy. Here, I reveal the painful, ugly truth about why it takes so long to build a building, what it is exactly that we do, and why that's not creamer you smell in my coffee.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

An article in today's Denver Post highlighted some houses that the city of Aurora (Colorado's second largest city, just east of Denver) have purchased from foreclosure and are fixing up to sell to qualified low-income and middle-income families. It's money from the Neighborhood Stabilization Act, which is part of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act (signed into law by Bush back in July), that allowed Aurora to do this in the first place. I'm loving this for a couple of reasons, one of which is that it's part of my Master Plan To Eradicate Everything Undesirable when I take over the world.

Contractors are being hired to work on the properties and make them essentially new when the new owner moves in. According to the article, potential buyers must meet certain income criteria before they can even look at a house, and the homes will be sold for their appraised value or for their purchase cost plus the cost of renovation, whichever is less (price is non-haggleable).

So there are three good things happening here: one, Aurora is employing contractors and keeping people on a payroll, which should inevitably put some cash back into the economy (every dollar into design and construction supposedly changes hands as many as five times, holla); two, the program gets folks into homes that would otherwise sit empty, look icky, and bring down everyone else's home values in the neighborhood; three, the low-income or middle-income families can benefit from normal-market home-ownership perks like being able to deduct mortgage interest on their taxes and sell the house for likely much more than they paid; and four, it has the possibility of mixing low-income families into middle-class neighborhoods, which can have a positive effect on the family.

Reasons Three and Four are the most important to me. Back in 2001 when I first started looking at buying a loft downtown, I looked into a new complex that was going up in LoDo. The saleslady mentioned affordable housing, and I thought I wasn't eligible until she informed me that the income limit for a single person for affordable housing was...$60,000. I was making about half that. First of all, what does it say about a society when we consider someone making $60,000 a year in need of affordable housing? Perhaps our housing costs are out of range for most decent, hardworking folk? I almost jumped at the chance to buy one of the affordable housing units, but then I discovered two nasty truths about them: one, they're the crappiest units in the building. They had no view, no balcony, and were on the noisiest corner of the complex. Good thing I wasn't trying to raise kids in this building. Second, I found out that the cost of the unit would have to be capped at a 5% increase of its previous purchase price for the next twenty years, in order to keep it as an afforable housing unit. So, I don't make a lot of cash now, and you'd like to punish me by not even letting me reap one of the good benefits of home ownership, the so-called American Dream. Thanks for punishing me for being poor.

When I was working on my thesis on designing environments for the homeless mentally ill, the head of the program I interviewed which had the lowest recidivism rate shared with me her secret for truly truning people from homeless to homeworthy: one, you have to provide support, like "reminder training" of how to keep a house clean and how to balance a checkbook (when people are homeless for too long, especially while taking drugs or suffering from a mental illness, they can actually "forget" how to do these things); and two, mix their housing units into the general population. Instead of ghettoizing them into a public housing complex and labeling them, put a person (or a few people) into an apartment complex our single- and dual-family home neighborhood full of working-class and middle-class folks. As Ruby Payne observed, if poor kids only hang out with poor adults, then they only learn how to do what poor people do. In a neighborhood full of people that understand the implicit and explicit value of listening to teachers, learning, saving for college, evaluating resources, and so on, lower-income families learn how to do what needs to be done to lift themselves out of poverty for the long term.

So, I like what Aurora is doing. They're taking care of their neighborhoods, their property values, and their communities. It's still not as far as my Master Plan To Eradicate Everything Undesirable would go, but it's a decent start.

About Me

I'm a (finally) licensed architect out here in the wild, wild West who kicks butts and punches lists. I focus on designing hospitals, which--between the program and the clients--is a real challenge. I like what I do for a living, and have the site observation photos to prove it. My job is part designer, part technician, part software guru, part counselor, part therapist, part spiritual guide, and part repo man. So don't toy with me, or I'll refuse to sign your Pay Application.

Note and Disclaimer

The content on this blog is not approved by my employers, fellow employees, or any professional organization involved in the design or construction industry. The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone and should not be considered representative of the opinions of my employers or my profession.
Any professional opinions, design concepts, layouts, and details should be taken with a grain of salt and a large margarita. This blog should not be used in place of consulting a design or construction professional in person, nor should it be a substitute for having a professional review your particular project.
All names and identifying details have been changed to protect the innocent as well as the guilty.
No, I will not design your deck for you.